A North Korean woman holds her smartphone in Pyongyang. Korea Times file photo

By Park Ji-won

North Korea is trying to find more ways to control access to outside information as the number of its citizens with smartphones increases, according to a recent report.

In the report released by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) on Dec. 18, journalist Martyn Williams wrote that the ways of shutting down overseas information in smartphones have been diversified over the last decade in an apparent move to control its people's freedom.

"Over the last decade, the regime has gotten increasingly sophisticated at clamping down on PCs and smartphones," Williams wrote in the report titled "Digital Trenches: North Korea's Information Counter-Offensive."

"It has proven adept at reacting to the potential freedoms such digital devices can bring and subverted open-source software to prevent citizens from exploiting those freedoms.

"As cellular subscriptions rose, which is considered some 5 million, more and more citizens use their phones to watch foreign media and, not only shutting down the cellular network, the country started to come up with various ways to control information by modifying the devices" he wrote.

He said Pyongyang was trying to adjust its strategies in three pillars to limit access to foreign media; punishment of users, surveillance of digital device use and propaganda.

He added, for example, the authorities worked to modify the Android operating system used on phones to lock down devices and make them much less useful for illicit media consumption.

Even though consuming foreign media had been considered a serious crime in the North, he said, "The mass of foreign content that has entered the country from the mid-2000s onwards has led to a curtailing of hard sentences for all but the most serious crimes."

Some experts say the North's regime will keep controlling information through its state-operated media network.

"The characteristic of the North Korean regime is that the country continues to control (outside information) and not allow its citizens to consume (content from overseas, being that is illegal in North Korea)," said Chung Eun-chan of the Institute of Unification Education.

She added that there were three major mobile carriers in North Korea ― Kangsong Network Carrier, Koryo Link and Byol ― and the North was likely tapping into citizens' phones through an embedded system in the Kangsong network.

"The country embedded a tapping system in the Kangsong Network and now forces people to join this network and avoid Koryo Link, which has a wiretap-proof security system."